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Spruston Lab

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Spruston Lab /

We aim to connect our understanding of neurons, synapses, and circuits to a deeper understanding of learned intelligent behavior. We obtain high resolution, large scale data from behaving animals to constrain quantitative models and ultimately theories that explain brain function.
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Lab Updates

News
09/08/22 | Congratulations to former postdoc Xinyu Zhao, for opening his new lab at Tsinghua University!
Publication
09/08/22 | Great collaboration between Janelia and UBC, led by former postdoc Mark Cembrowski, resulted in this beautiful paper in eLife. Congrats to all!
Publication
01/10/22 | We are very pleased with this new paper reporting on a cool project led by Xinyu Zhao. Also check out the colorful Preview by Michael Brecht.
Publication
03/19/21 | Former Spruston lab postdoc released a preprint on some cool circuit mapping in mouse infralimbic cortex. Preprint.
News
06/29/20 | Ching-Lung Hsu will start a new position on Sept. 1, 2020: Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Neuroscience Program, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. Congratulations Ching-Lung!!
News
06/29/20 | David Hunt will start a new position on Sept. 1, 2020: Assistant Professor, Ctr for Neural Science and Medicine, Dept. Biomedical Sciences & Dept. Neurology, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles. Congratulations David!!
Publication
05/25/20 | In collaboration with Jeff Magee (formerly at Janelia and now the Baylor College of Medicine), we identified a synaptic mechanism for the contextual gating of place-cell firing in the hippocampus. Nature Neuroscience, 2020. View
Publication
04/28/20 | In collaboration with former Spruston lab postdoc Mark Cembrowski (now at UBC), we identified a cell type in the dentate gyrus that is selectively recruited following novel experiences. Cell Reports, 2020. View
Publication
09/19/19 | The MouseLight project team (Janelia) determined the whole-brain axon projections of over 1,000 neurons -- the largest effort to date to determine single-neuron projections in the mouse brain. Cell, 2019. View
Publication
10/30/19 | In collaboration with the Svoboda lab and the Janelia Experimental Technologies team, we developed a new microscope to image dendritic activity in mice performing a short-term memory task. eLife, 2019. View
Publication
10/31/19 | New publication in 2019: In collaboration with Dezhe Jin (Penn State Univ.) we developed open-source software for reconstructing dendritic morphology. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, 2019. View
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We study the function of neurons and glia in the hippocampus. This structure is a nexus of behaviorally relevant information arriving from many brain areas. These external representations are combined with internal representations of recent experiences—short-term memories—to generate output that is distributed to other brain areas, in order to adaptively guide behavior and form long-term memories. The goal of our lab is to understand how different hippocampal cell types communicate with their synaptic partners within and outside of the hippocampal circuit, altering their activity and connections as a function of experience.

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The brain seems to be made up of a bewildering complexity of parts, and the cells within the parts seem to be characterized by an inscrutable complexity of form, extent, and relationships with each other.

Gordon M. Shepherd

The Synaptic Organization of the Brain, 2nd ed., 1979.